Synaptic Silence

Editorial for the South County Spotlight, published Feb 20, 2008

I took a break from work a while back. I stepped back temporarily, partly due to some medical problems, but perhaps equally because I was emotionally drained to the point of exhaustion from my work as a civil commitment investigator. My job primarily involves the evaluation of mentally ill persons to determine if they pose a danger to themselves or others. I knew I was in trouble when I felt totally overwhelmed after testifying at a hearing that resulted in an angry and depressed young man being involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment.

After much reflection, I realized that I was so emotional out of relief – relief that he got the help he needed, and an equal feeling of gratitude that the judge had seen through his calm facade and glimpsed the lurking violence I had sensed in my encounters with him. It suddenly struck me how crucial these decisions are to people like this young man, his parents, and the rest of society in general. The weight of everyone’s role in the process – making the case to the level necessary for the court to rescind his constitutional right of liberty – suddenly seemed far greater than I had ever experienced it.

Then came the terrible killings at Virginia Tech. Now the horror has been repeated at Northern Illinois University. Watching the frantic efforts to make sense of a senseless tragedy and listening to the impotent attempts to place blame somewhere for the slaughter, I could only share in their frustration and cry along with them. Because there really isn’t a simple answer.

For decades, mental illness was something people hid from others because of societal stigma. The terrible legacy of eugenics and other efforts to weed the mentally ill from our midst are dark shadows on our common history.

Yet in spite of research to the contrary, the notion that depression, psychosis, mania, and other mental disorders stem from some intrinsic moral weakness or demonic influence is still with us. This occurs when we blindly apply the logic of our own internal experiences to those of others, invalidating them and tacitly abandoning them in the process.

The system we have to deal with the rare cases of potentially violent mentally ill individuals is not perfect. Still, as terrible as the killings at these two universities were, we should not dismiss the progress we have made. With rare exceptions, the statutes that deal with civil commitment in Oregon and other states serve their purpose and keep us all safe from the tiny percentage of people with mental illness who may actually harm someone. These laws are the constitutional balance between preventing unwarranted prejudice against people with mental disorders and ensuring their own safety and the safety of society.

The issue in question after the killings on our university campuses is where that actual balance lies. There are already calls to move the needle toward the greater good of society. I would counter that the best guarantee against such tragedies is not the blind abandonment of a legal process that, in spite of its shortcomings, is consistently effective. Rather, the true solution is to reverse the draconian cutbacks in funding for social services and mental health care that have resulted in so many people with mental disorders slipping into their own terrible wells of hopelessness, paranoia, and anger. Without a well-funded and easily accessible outpatient mental health support system, our safety ends, as it did at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, the moment a potential shooter stops his medication, or walks out of a locked psychiatric ward and back into society.

Above all, we must refrain from retreating into our own wells of ignorance and false superiority that have guided our actions toward the mentally ill for so long. Walls built out of fear and misinformation provide no safety at all. They are merely a warped reflective surface in which our own intrinsic prejudices are unnecessarily and falsely reinforced as the truth.